Ideas: From Concept To Concrete

by Mike Manes

Legend has it that about 200 B.C., Julius Caesar Bordeaux, sales manager for General Chariots Inc., arrived late for the annual sales meeting. He may have been a great salesman, but he was never on time.

Bordeaux entered the room covered with mud and smiling from ear to ear. Holding an urn in each hand, he talked a mile a minute. 'Sorry I'm late; my chariot got stuck in the mud. The good news is that it gave me a great idea!'

As he held up the two urns he asked, 'Does anyone know what this is?' Cassius Comeaux whispered to Brutus Belanger, 'I hope this isn't a Grecian urn joke.'

'In one urn I have a gray powder called cement. It's a mixture of limestone and clay that's been heated to form glass cinders that are ground down into cement. In this second urn, I have water. If we mix the cement with water, it forms concrete. The mixture hardens into a stone-like substance as it dries. We can spread it over our cart paths so that our chariots will never get stuck again. There'll be many other applications, but I just haven't had time to think them through.'

The audience smirked and rolled their eyes since concrete was such a radical departure from traditional thought. In a broader sense, the term 'concrete' means something familiar and comfortable that doesn't require explanation or thought. It's also the focus of the majority of our time.

If we act like Bordeaux's colleagues, dismissing all new ideas as kooky, we're destined to stay stuck in the mud of the status quo. In today's fast-moving world, that's tantamount to failure.

Business leaders must encourage everyone to innovate, and they must listen to those who think differently. Our growth and prosperity will come from developing new concepts, evaluating and prioritizing them, and converting the best ones into concrete!

By the way, what's a Grecian urn?